They’ve moved the mountain. They found out about what was supposed to be a hard-and-fast NCAA rule, they raised their voices, and they reduced the rule—and the people defending it—to dust.

If there is any real justice, this is only the beginning. But it’s a tremendously encouraging beginning.

Wisconsin and coach Bo Ryan now are off of the back of transferring basketball player Jarrod Uthoff, and the masses are the ones who gave the big shove. This comes two months after Maryland, which was trying to restrict where quarterback Danny O’Brien could transfer, was forced to reverse course by a public backlash.

A similar outcry starting in December, however, couldn’t free St. Joseph’s basketball player Todd O’Brien (no relation) to transfer to UAB. But the noise was just as loud, and the spotlight was just as hot.

Best of all: The blinds opened, just a crack, back then. With the Maryland and Wisconsin cases that followed, they’re wide open. The sunshine has flooded that dark room in which the NCAA’s oppressive transfer policies—and the impunity with which coaches wield them—had been hidden for so long. According to the NCAA, 40 percent of men’s Division I players transfer during their tenures. It’s now safe to assume that each one of them is given less than a completely free choice of where to go.

Who knew? Well, everybody knows now.

Any time the NCAA’s dirt is brought out into the light of day—the stuff they never mention during their annual March Madness advertising, when they sling it left and right about the athletes who are going pro in something other than sports—the better it is for those very athletes.

They're the ones who are treated like commodities, not like young lives in transition from childhood to adulthood. They're the ones about whom the NCAA fibs to the public about being treated like the rest of the student body, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

They're the ones of whom the people are told are “given” a free education in return for their athletic prowess—but who really are workers the NCAA is trying its best not to pay.

After all, is there another scholarship given out by the colleges that includes, in essence, a non-compete clause? Is there another in which, if a student does decide to change schools, his or her original school has grounds to claim “tampering” by another?

Not if the goal is the actual pursuit of education, with the student’s best interests in mind—rather than the coach’s contract and the school’s cut of a TV pie worth billions of dollars.

This underhanded power play, like all the others, drew that very power largely from the fact hardly anyone knew the details of it.

Those days might be over.

This is where new media can take the ultimate bow. It isn’t so much that commentators in print, on air and on line railed against it; that’s commonplace for egregious acts like the ones St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli, Maryland coach Randy Edsall and Wisconsin's Ryan tried to pull. It’s when the railing went viral, spread to the corners of the basketball fan universe by Twitter, Facebook and everything else that the groundswell became too much.

Such instant blowback kept the St. Joseph’s case alive for months. It forced Maryland to loosen its grip after a week and a half. Wisconsin gave Uthoff his freedom papers in just a few days.

Now, there might not be a next time.

On Friday, NCAA president Mark Emmert said the organization will consider changing its network of rules. This is partly because those rules make college sports look like the pros, he said, and partly because he’s concerned about “whether it’s fair or not to the young men and young women. What’s the rationale for constraining someone to move from school to school?”

Emmert probably would have looked at the issue now anyway—even if he and the NCAA hadn’t gotten this blast of rotten P.R. less than three weeks after the glow of the Final Four had peaked.

Sure, he would have.

The NCAA can’t hide any more. The door is open, and the sunshine has been let in. And the people won’t shut up until the room is as bright as day.